Welcome to our first Fall CSA box of the season. Abundance, color, and flavor are first and foremost in this first fall box. It’s the best of the lingerings of summer and the beginning of the fall crops.

We have partially prepped a few items in your box this time such as the husked corn 1/2 ears, cubed watermelon, and the shredded coleslaw mix. In our licensed kitchen, we are able to do these tasks which make the foods more ready-to-eat and the debris can either be fed to the animals or composted right here on the farm. We hope this makes eating your way through the box a little easier.

Another thing we do to inspire ways to use the vegetables is link recipe suggestions next to the items on the box list above. Some of these recipes we have tried and liked, some we want to try, and some just are reliable ways to eat seasonally. Please feel free to substitute items on the recipe in order to keep the recipe seasonal, and suitable to the accessibility you have to a grocery store. For example, if a recipe calls for leeks or scallions right now, you could substitute onions in the recipe to get a similar flavor into the recipe. Or if you do not like onions, perhaps you just omit them versus overlooking the recipe.

Although the summer was filled with lots of rain, most crops did pretty well. Tomatoes, peppers, and basil have been abundant in the warmth. The garlic and carrot crops were wonderful this year. And our fall planting of broccoli seems to coming in at just the right time.

A few challenges this summer have been the following: the fall planted beets drowned in the flood rains we received last month, the onions yielded poorly as many did not dry down properly for storage but we still have a sufficient supply for our fall/winter CSA, and the storage potatoes have been challenging to dig in the constant wet conditions. Our rutabaga have also failed to size up properly and that issue still stumps us.

Every season has its plusses and minuses and they tend to equal out over time. We do our best to buffer these effects and utilize all of the harvest. This year, there will be no shortage of pickles as the cucumbers were abundant. And those onions that didn’t store well, they are getting chopped and frozen to use for the pizza nights. Extra peppers are not thrown out, but frozen for future use. It’s a challenge to keep up with the flushes in the garden but it is so satisfying to watch the preserved goodness stack up.